September 30, 2003

We all may find it hard to admit that the progressive, intellectual, open-minded party is the one to lose the battle over rhetoric. Yet, it has occurred. Republicans have managed to use language to link the “liberal agenda” to radicalism and create the illusion that the American people are becoming more conservative. I read a great article on how The Democrats Were Framed which suggested that rhetoric had much to do with the current political climate. Adding my own inferences, I realized how true it really is:

September 29, 2003

Dean or Clark? I don’t know who I want to support. It’s almost impossible to make a decision. My thoughts on this, I suppose, go back to the issue of principle vs. results I brought up in the Abortion vs. Affirmative Action entry. Should we (the liberals) support Howard Dean, who has the right views, or Wesley Clark, who has a better chance of appealing to moderates and therefore being elected? I guess I don’t have to make up my mind right now. I think the best thing that Democrats can do is put off a strong sense of solidarity, which might mean supporting Dean. That’s long term, though; getting a half-decent person in the white house as soon as possible would be really nice – right now it may be a fair trade for changing the culture.

Should I go to my Telecommunications class? I don’t see any need to go; the teacher posts the assignments on the web page, and the lectures are USELESS. On the other hand, there is supposed to be some group assignment coming up and I don’t want to miss it. If I did, I would probably fail the class since it’s a big grade. I can’t risk that.

Class started three minutes ago. Too late.

I really need to build some sort of connection with someone. I am socially deprived. I went home for a few hours this weekend and I actually enjoyed talking to my parents. Holy shit. I don’t know what it is that makes me pass up opportunities to get to know people when they come to me. I think the issue is that some part of me knows that these people don’t want anything beyond a superficial relationship and I would like to make real relationships. I let myself get into a bad place when I hung out with the same person all the time for the first week of school (therefore I was not meeting people in the beginning when everyone else was new and forming cliques) and then, well… here I am. Not cliqued. I am anti-clique anyway. I won’t be a part of them. Like I said, I want real relationships. A boyfriend would be nice too. But it’s OK. I’m still happy.

September 27, 2003

Last evening started out as a fun time with some friends and turned to be a crappy night. Someone (to remain unnamed) was pissing me off (again), and there were a few other problems I was dealing with at the same time. I’m ok; last night is an example of how my life is going nowadays and I have always had the attitude that, no matter how bad things seem to be getting, tomorrow will be better. An old wound got opened up later on in the night, but the situation also opened up a new opportunity to deal with that person and get some closure. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it works out.

I’m realizing that I really hate to fight with people. I love arguing and debating, which sometimes leads to trouble because other people often take our disagreements really personally whereas I see it as just conversation, but I certainly hate having any kind of unnecessary animosity between myself and someone else. I’m not non-confrontational, but I won’t start a fight unless the issue is really important. (I’ve never been in a physical fight with anyone except my sister, the guy across the street when I was 11, and a friend in Boy Scouts when I was 14.) I know for sure that I have problems with other people telling me how to be, and I don’t tell other people how to be, even though people sometimes decide that I am doing that when they don’t take the time to think about what I am actually trying to explain. (Alas, miscommunication is my fate; it’s my bad Karma from being an ass in some past life situation.) I took a few online psychology tests and some inkblot tests and all of them say that my personality is “peaceful” and that my goal in life is to maintain peace. It would be a big coincidence if all these different groups came up with the same answer by bullshitting, so I suppose that there must be come credibility to it. Why is it, then, if all this is true, that I love turmoil? I love mass movements and political unrest and all that. I thrive on it. What I hate is when people get into fights and disrespect each other. It’s ok to stir up things as long as you’re respectful. It’s ok to stir up things if you’re protesting a larger social evil, like the Iraq war. Maybe that’s what the inkblot tests were bringing out – I am okay with turmoil, as long as people are respectful. I don’t know. All this is interesting, but really, who cares? I am what I am; whether the American Psychological Association wants to call it peace-motivated or they want to call it horny, it’s only their word for a personality. It doesn’t change anything or reveal anything I didn’t already know. It just shows me how other people might describe it.

September 25, 2003

When I was a little kid, my grandma was always adamant in expressing to my parents that I was a really smart kid. They didn’t completely believe her; my grandma was a special ed teacher so they figured she had some bias. Still, they let her persuade them to take me to some psychologist and get my IQ tested.

I wish they’d never told me the score, because it gave me this idea that I had some sort of intellectual authority over my peers. I always thought I was smarter than most people around me and figured that my one-up in life was that I had a high intelligence. I don’t have the best looks, I am by far physically weaker than most people around me, and I am not all that book smart – but I believed I had some outrageously high intelligence that I could always feel good about. Not that intelligence means that much, but I think that everyone pretty much agrees that it is still an advantage. The self esteem boost was one positive aspect of knowing the test score.

Well, lately I have been curious to see if I would get anywhere around that same score if I took an IQ test again at age eighteen. I screwed around with a few online tests (well, two), and was really disappointed with the results. I don’t want to say what my scores were when I was four and what they were now, but I’ll admit that my scores from today’s test were significantly – about twenty points – lower than what I thought my IQ was. That is a huge difference. An average score is 100, and if you’re up around 120, you have already passed most people by. When you get up into a slightly higher range, twenty points is an even bigger difference. Theoretically, from what I can understand, a person can drop from being one out of one thousand to being one out of seventy five with a twenty point drop in his or her IQ. Needless to say, that is a HUGE change. I’m not sure exactly what my percentiles were then and now, but I dropped about twenty three points according to these tests and I am not happy.

Why do I care about how I ranked against to other people? Well, I don’t really know; maybe it’s because, in the past, whenever I would do poorly in my writing or whenever I wouldn’t be able to intellectually keep up with someone, I would decide that I am intelligent enough and have the potential to keep up, but I don’t work as hard as they do and that’s why they’re doing better than me. I would always assume that I can catch up later in life or that I would eventually find my way to stand out because I am so exceptionally intelligent. It’s not like I thought being smart made me any better than anyone else; it just meant that I would have a (possibly unfair) advantage and that I am likely to be able to tackle some big things. And in any case, I didn’t tell people what my IQ was, (Well, as a little kid I bragged about it but obviously now I know better.) it was just something that I knew and that I, personally, could feel secure in.

Logically I know that after taking the test I stand exactly where I did yesterday before I took it, and I know that there is a good chance that the test is not that accurate anyway. (Or that the two of them together, which reported the same score within ten points, are not that accurate.) Still, this is the ONE THING I thought that I would always have going for me, and you can imagine what it would be like if any of you saw the one thing going for you suddenly become much less of a big deal. (Still good, but not nearly as exciting.) It would be as if a president became, instead, the mayor of Pueblo. Again, I am not saying that intelligence is that important; It’s just that I do not score very high in the other aspects of life and it was nice, while it lasted, to know I had this one score.

Oh well…three days from now I won’t even be thinking about it anymore. It’s certainly not the end of the world.

September 23, 2003

This is one of those nights, maybe some of you know what I mean, when I have all this passion but nowhere to direct it. The feeling is always infected with a twinge of loneliness and sometimes it includes a burning urge to connect with someone even though there’s no one there. With nowhere else to direct my energies I have to sit down and write something. It can’t be the analytical nonsense that I usually bother myself with when I write. It has to be something deep, maybe philosophical, poetic, or at least strikingly truthful. I don’t have the ability to come up with something along those lines that would be worth anyone’s while to read, but I write anyway. I do it for myself if nothing else. It doesn’t have to matter to anyone but me.

I can imagine how many people have those heat-of-the-moment passion poems that were conjured up when every trivial aspect of life seems to have a profound meaning – when poetry is the only reasonable way that thoughts can be expressed. We all have our poems packed into the bottom of our purses or backpacks, lying crumpled and hidden in desk drawers, or lost between the pages of some rarely-opened book. Too afraid to let anyone see the rough beginnings of a maybe-someday-decent poem for fear of being judged or patronized by the reader, we let the crumpled sheets of paper lie where they are until we forget about them or throw them away. We all know our friends would say “wow, that’s really good,” but actually be thinking “I would change this and that” or “how nice that he can amuse himself with writing that way.” Sometimes the poems just don’t work without the song that was in the background when we wrote it or without the mood we were in at the time. Whatever it is that makes mine turn out the way they do, I have written plenty, and still I only like looking back over maybe four of the whole lot.

Respecting one’s own poetry is a positive attitude, but expecting someone else to like it feels to me, maybe wrongfully, like conceit. If I write it now and amend it later, wait a month and go through it again, and keep changing it from time to time as my outlook changes and my writing styles evolve and become more complete, maybe someday it will be a good poem. For now, I am comfortable with the audience of page 467 of my high school AP English text book and the rear right corner of the bottom desk drawer. Sometimes that’s all I really have.

September 22, 2003

This excerpt was taken from some anti-gay pamphlets I came across while searching for some documents I needed for paper due Tuesday in my sexuality class. (For anyone who is curious, the group is called the Family Research Institute, it’s based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the pamphlets are accessible here.) The excerpt is as follows:

The gay lifestyle is strikingly impermanent. Homosexuals are acutely aware that while their sexual desires will continue, few will be sexually interested in them after their 30th birthday. Good health is frequently interrupted by bouts with alcoholism and STDs – and because their lifespan is so short (the median age of death for gays and lesbians is in the mid-40s while for married heterosexuals it is in the 70s (19) ), associates frequently die. Unlike the relatively permanent satisfactions and attachments of marriage and parenthood, those associated with homosexuality are fleeting.

It is far from surprising that half of gays expressed regret about their homosexuality (5) or that four times as many would advise adolescents who were just beginning homosexual activity to stop rather than continue. (4)

Ok so can ANYONE explain to me the meaning of the second paragraph? I am a little confused. Four times as many gays as half of all gays is WHAT FRACTION OF GAY PEOPLE NOW?

I invite (and maybe even recommend) you all to follow the link and read more from the pamphlets; I found them amusing and I’m sure you would all manage to find some enjoyment in them as well. If you find any more excerpts that are as entertaining as this one is, point them out for me and I’d love to post them.

In all your comments please do not say bitchy things about the Family Research Institute, Focus on the Family, the Christian Right, or the Moral Majority. You are preaching to the choir, and besides, we can have all sorts of fun with this without getting passionate about it.

Asereje, ja, deje, de jebe tu de jebere sebiunouva majavi an a bugui an a buididipi

September 21, 2003

Please everybody don’t get the idea that I am some sort of Republican or something. I don’t know exactly the sentiment that I was trying to get across by putting the republican club announcement on my page (it was emailed to me on my student address) but it is meant to have a tone of some sort of mocking irony. (Something to the effect of those cute little ignorant conservatives. Now they’re organizing at the college. What will they come up with next?) I express their message with the same sentiment as the Bible Verse of the Day, of which so far on my journal there are three. Maybe I should have mentioned what I was trying to convey with the Republican clip on the message itself. In fact, I think I’ll do that now.

Just so you all know, I am officially a slut now, by my own standards, which are all that count. I’m not sure that slut-ness exists (it’s just a social construction that doesn’t mean anything), but I am a slut nevertheless. I will tell you all about it when the story is old enough to feel impersonal. (I’ll say it in less than a week.)

Are you tired of liberal professors telling you what to think?
Want to join a community of conservative students?
JOIN THE COLLEGE REPUBLICANS!
Next meeting: September 24, 7pm, Ramaley N1B23.
Email: cugop@colorado.edu Ph: 303-492-1245
Contact: Brad Jones
Additional information:http://www.colorado.edu/StudentGroups/CURepublicans/

Those cute little ignorant conservatives. Now they’re organizing at the college, and emailing people at random to join. How precious. What will they come up with next?

September 19, 2003

I change my mind. I am realizing how much the last entry makes me sound like a stuck up bitch. I promise I am not saying that I am so great and that everyone wants me. To be honest, everyone who has ever been interested in me was someone who I was not interested in, and vice versa. I have big issues with the fact that I get rejected constantly. If you were making a graph of all the times I have been rejected, the rejection would have to be the independent variable and the existence of time would be the dependant. (Possibly an exaggeration, but you get the point.) I am getting blown off by guys I am genuinely interested in, and blown off by guys that I am not attracted to and would just like to say hello to occasionally (not that I really give a shit what those guys think). I suppose that in my previous entry I was just trying to see the best side of things: I’d rather focus on a dilemma with the distant guys who like me superficially (with whom a relationship, which is what I really want, would be totally impractical) than face the hard fact that everybody I come in contact with more than once in a long while thinks I’m gross. But OH WELL I am not trying to put off any of the people who are interested in me (albeit superficially) who, if circumstances were different, I might actually really like in a more-than-just-friends/fuck-buddies sense.

It’s 11:30 on Friday night and I am alone in my dorm. Do you know who your friends are giving blowjobs to?

I would say that lately my sex drive has been drastically higher than usual. (Okay, that’s an understatement.) I don’t know what caused it. It’s something about this environment that makes my testosterone level or some other important hormone raise up to a new level. Maybe it’s the abundance of hot guys I can check out. Maybe it’s the different food. Regardless of the cause, I have been wanting to hook up lately. I don’t want to be too slutty or go too far out of my comfortable level of sexual activity (which is on the prude side as far as the number of people I’ll do it with goes) but having some friend that I could mess around with would be nice. I’ve been meeting quite a few new guys lately. With many of them I have opened up the possibility of hooking up. (In addition to my increased sex drive in general, I am always exceptionally horny when I am talking to a guy and therefore more keen on the idea of making out or fooling around, so the conversation starts to meander in that direction and I never feel like putting a stop to it.) Now I have about five acquaintances expecting to turn out as friends with benefits and there’s really no way that I would be comfortable establishing it with all of them. The idea of planning to hook up in advance or meeting someone just for sex bothers me. Just one guy I could meet up with periodically would be a big deal for me–by far enough sex for me to be satisfied. Considering the rate that I am meeting new people, my number of potentials are likely to proliferate before they shrink. Without a doubt I am going to have to turn down more people than I can accept.

Another issue at hand is that I really wanted to find a CU person for the friend with benefits. I want someone who lives here because it would be nice to get to know a person really well and have a strong friendship before we get physical. Plus, it would be nice to have someone who lives close by so we can get to each others’ bedrooms easily. My list, so far, consists of people who do not go to CU. That means we could only see each other on weekends or on days that I can stay out late, and I would have to plan it at least a day in advance. That was never what I wanted from the beginning. No matter what type of relationship my hookup and I are to have, a major rule for me is that the majority of time we spend together is to be invested in casual activities, talking, and getting to be good friends. The use here of the word “hookup” in itself is somewhat inaccurate, because as I always say, I want friends with benefits, and I would never NEVER hook up with a stranger.

On top of all these difficulties, there is the fact that if some guy were to come along who I like enough to want a more exclusive relationship and if this relationship were to start, we would be monogamous and all my extraneous sexual relationships would have to end.

As of now, I resolve, knowing full well how controversial my resolutions are with my readers, to stop my habit of starting more relationships than I can handle. From here on, no opening the potential of a friend with benefits until I get the ones I have worked out. Just make friends. (Okay, there are a few guys I have my eye on who I would add to my list, but only because they are CU students which is what I wanted from the beginning.) With new friends a sexual aspect might be in the back of my mind as a possibility, but we will start out as friends who hang out and “accidentally” start sticking our hands down each others’ pants in the heat of the moment when we are both drunk or particularly needy. An even better resolution: how about everything I start from now out on will be a friendship where we accidentally start sticking our hands down each others’ pants in the heat of the moment when we are both drunk or needy. That was always my attitude before I got here.

I hate how my intellectual attractions always get confused for sexual ones. When I can have a good conversation with somebody I always end up wanting to fuck them. (“Fuck” meaning hand jobs or anything not including anal sex which I am still apprehensive about.)

How about I stop rationalizing this and making rules for myself that I KNOW I’ll break. Yeah… that sounds about right. I guess I’ll just wait and see what happens. Please disregard the preceding entry.